Last minute shopping
Olivia Nuzzi sat down for drinks with Rudolph Giuliani and brought back this entertaining interview. Now I'm sorry I didn't get her anything.
Barneys New York store is in its final days. This will be good news for my old friend Carl, who bought his clothes there when it was a working-class discount place (I said old friend). One day he walked in and was greeted by deafening music and a supercilious salesman who looked him over and said, "I think you want our Omar Room." (A size-ist slur, not a racist one. The store's problems with racism would come later.) Carl left and never returned. Found one of those places that euphemistically cater to "big and tall men." The official reason for the closing is a gasp-inducing rent increase of the kind that have driven so many retailers (and people) from so many cities. Apparently the influencers, or whatever they're called, buy their clothes online. I thought that was just for people like me, who dress for comfort and warmth. Evidently it's also for people who like waiting for the UPS driver to pick up the inevitable returns, or worry about being assaulted in a dressing room by a depraved developer.
Are there any big stores left in Manhattan? B. Altman and Arnold Constable are libraries. (How do they swing the rent?) Gimbels is long gone. Coliseum Books may be a Burger King. Record stores, where I spent so much time and money, are history. The Record Hunter should have been preserved as a museum. The Strand must be the last of the second-hand bookstores, once the pride of Fourth Avenue. Remember Samuel Weiser's occult bookshop? I'll be getting phlegmy soon. Please tell me Scribner's elegant quarters on Fifth Avenue is still a book store at least. I never thought I was quite good enough to climb that staircase, but the poetry was on the upper level.
I don't know what brought this on. I hate shopping, crowds, and shopping in crowds. Maybe it was seeing B. Altman again, lovingly re-created for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Maybe it's the inescapable Miracle On Thirty-fourth Street, a not-even-thinly disguised commercial for Macys before the parade was focused on big dumb balloons and shivering dancers from Broadway. Any minute now I'll be kvelling over the pastrami at Wolf's Deli, not quite in a class with Katz's but the best in midtown (don't speak of the Carnegie). And meeting my Dad for dinner at Luchow's. German food, lethal as a Panzer. Did Aiello's Pizza ever re-open after the fire?
Enough. I never bought chestnuts from a vendor but I loved how the smoke smelled. What are you supposed to do with a bunch of hot chestnuts while you struggle onto a bus? I suppose the buses cost more money than anyone wants to carry, and they don't take dollar bills. Maybe I'll walk through the twilight and watch the lights come on.
Barneys New York store is in its final days. This will be good news for my old friend Carl, who bought his clothes there when it was a working-class discount place (I said old friend). One day he walked in and was greeted by deafening music and a supercilious salesman who looked him over and said, "I think you want our Omar Room." (A size-ist slur, not a racist one. The store's problems with racism would come later.) Carl left and never returned. Found one of those places that euphemistically cater to "big and tall men." The official reason for the closing is a gasp-inducing rent increase of the kind that have driven so many retailers (and people) from so many cities. Apparently the influencers, or whatever they're called, buy their clothes online. I thought that was just for people like me, who dress for comfort and warmth. Evidently it's also for people who like waiting for the UPS driver to pick up the inevitable returns, or worry about being assaulted in a dressing room by a depraved developer.
Are there any big stores left in Manhattan? B. Altman and Arnold Constable are libraries. (How do they swing the rent?) Gimbels is long gone. Coliseum Books may be a Burger King. Record stores, where I spent so much time and money, are history. The Record Hunter should have been preserved as a museum. The Strand must be the last of the second-hand bookstores, once the pride of Fourth Avenue. Remember Samuel Weiser's occult bookshop? I'll be getting phlegmy soon. Please tell me Scribner's elegant quarters on Fifth Avenue is still a book store at least. I never thought I was quite good enough to climb that staircase, but the poetry was on the upper level.
I don't know what brought this on. I hate shopping, crowds, and shopping in crowds. Maybe it was seeing B. Altman again, lovingly re-created for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Maybe it's the inescapable Miracle On Thirty-fourth Street, a not-even-thinly disguised commercial for Macys before the parade was focused on big dumb balloons and shivering dancers from Broadway. Any minute now I'll be kvelling over the pastrami at Wolf's Deli, not quite in a class with Katz's but the best in midtown (don't speak of the Carnegie). And meeting my Dad for dinner at Luchow's. German food, lethal as a Panzer. Did Aiello's Pizza ever re-open after the fire?
Enough. I never bought chestnuts from a vendor but I loved how the smoke smelled. What are you supposed to do with a bunch of hot chestnuts while you struggle onto a bus? I suppose the buses cost more money than anyone wants to carry, and they don't take dollar bills. Maybe I'll walk through the twilight and watch the lights come on.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 11:26 AM
2 Comments:
A few (3) comments:
• Sorry, Scribner's is gone. The bookstore, not the wonderful building. Some other retail business is in it. I passed it the other day on the Fifth Avenue bus, but I can't remember what the business was. Something clearly forgettable, but having to do with clothing, I think, although possibly the only empty store that didn't turn into a nail parlor.
• Also sorry, but Altman's deserved to die. I realized that quite a few...well, actually a hell of a lot of decades ago when, as newlyweds, my now ex-wife and I went in there to return a very expensive porcelain bud vase of a wedding present so theat we could buy something we actually needed, like a toaster oven. The saleswoman, one of those people who wore Blue Cross shoes and a print dress with big flowers said at the top of her lungs, "These stupid kids. They have no idea what's good!" When one side of the building turned into a public library a few years later, and the other side into something-or-.
other for CCNY, I quietly promised myself to have a big plateful of chilled revenge when I got home for dinner.
• Chestnuts. Delicious actually. But for a while I couldn't eat them on the bus because I couldn't recharge my metro card. In order to do that, you have to go down in the subway. But no subway within a mile of me has an elevator, and I'd just had hip surgery. Unfortunately cabs don't dispense hot chestnuts. Too bad. Business might improve if they did.
Yours crankily,
The New York Crank
Odd, for some reason, Lüchow's came to mind to me earlier today. I remember going once when I was a child. I think that contemplating a Rolf's trip for the holidays is what made me think of Lüchow's.
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